The New York Times has a good recent article on bees, why they’re so important to human life and agriculture, the disturbing rapid decline in their population, and a breakthrough that’s occurred in the last week. The news isn’t good: colony collapse, and it may be linked to a combination fungus/virus. Hopefully this new evidence will lead to a solution.Trouble in the Hive, by Kirk Johnson for the NY Times

(In this case, surprisingly, academia teamed up with the US Army chemical and biological research group. It’s nice to see a non-destructive military application of chemicals and biology.)

The connection to sound, though, is clear to me: just as photographs or video can help us get closer to subjects that matter, so can sound and music. They’re another way of experiencing our world. So send in that bee music.

Thanks for the cool sample set. But I remember Francesco Lopez working with Bee sounds many years ago in his sound installations. I like that this guy made some cool electronica out of it, as it's a but hard to listen to 18Khz sounds for any period of time.

Without first hunting down the citations or being too specific, I'd like to mention that there is another audio linkage that CDM followers would appreciate: the frequencies that healthy colonies radiate are different from threatened ones. The info is probably within the links of this post, but I'm sure we could track them down.

al

definatly the bees knees
really awsome sounds

Johan Strandell

Swedish musician/actor Gaby Stenberg made a bee set for the Mellotron back in the 1970s. Roth-Händle studios have got a copy of the tapes and there are some videos on Youtube, like this one:

I produced a 15 minute recording on the 17th October 2010 using one sample of a bee trapped in a glass taken from the "made with bees" article on create digital music.com, It was made with just one max patch in one live recording featuring Tom Erbes excellent externals…

the signal path is just a an sfplay~ into +pitchdelay~ into +decimate~ into +delay~ into +bubble~ into dac~… with adoutput~ into sfrecord~ to record the output.

Hello – it's time to put honey bees on the back burner for a minute and talk about native, wild bees – most of which do not make honey or wax, or live in hives (see comment below). I've been creating audio art from bumble bees and other kinds of (mostly native) non-honey bees, as wel as honey bees, since 2003. Many of these works are posted at sonus.ca, under my name. I have also been directing and creating work within "Resonating Bodies – a series of mixed media installations and community outreach projects which focuses on biodiversity of pollinators indigenous to the natural and urban ecosystems of the Greater Toronto Area." My current work revolves around amplified habitat installations for wild, solitary-nesting bees and wasps: http://resonatingbodies.wordpress.com/art/audio-b…. The following comment sums up my perspective:

"…Although the number of [bee] species currently managed for pollination in North America is comparatively small, native wild bees are thought to be responsible for quite a large proportion of the economic benefits attributed to honey bees (Buchmann and Nabhan, 1996). Sometimes, it is not only the number of visits to a flower, but also the diversity of bee species visiting (controlled for total number of insect visits) that determines crop yield (Kremen et al., 2002). Wild bees are also crucial for the pollination of most non-crop flowering plants, and thus play an even greater role in most terrestrial ecosystems (Kevan, 2001, 2003; Kevan and Imperatriz-Fonseca, 2002)."

From "The Bee Genera of Eastern Canada", from the Canadian Journal of Anthropod Identification (CJAI 03 September 25, 2007; by Laurence Packer, Julio A. Genaro and Cory S. Sheffield, York University, Department of Biology, Canada)

Cheers n thanks for the sample set, used them for a drum rack and a synth, along with some recordings of my own. They're here, mashed up alongside monsanto commercials, movie clips, live instrumentation etc., into the story of colony collapse disorder…http://soundcloud.com/biomimicrant/bad-medicine-p…
also, still working on getting good recordings of multiple hives stacked together. the sound is something else, like club speakers. If anyone's got field recordings, please let me know.

chris

There has been a bee in my house for three days. He piggybacked on my back till I turned around trying to kill him. Bees well they kinda have the fast flying thing down. I randomly found this site, and played the music by the exit of my house. Adios bee!

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